“World Without Walls”

by zunguzungu

Much has happened in the last 36 hours, but, very coincidentally, the essay I wrote for the good people at Technology Review has gone online today, and I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s behind a pay-wall, but you can register and get three reading credits to read it if you’re not a subscriber (or get a subscription and read it in print!). The piece is about the changing nature and possibility of privacy, written first against the backdrop of both advancing technological innovations for information sharing and then against and about the Federal Government’s post-911 initiative to build an “Information Sharing Environment,” with fusion centers being the sort of beast that has evolved to live and thrive within it. And one concrete example of how fusion centers have been (mis)used just happens to be this anti-war protest in Oakland in 2003, in which a fusion center sent the Oakland Police Department some sketchy information, which then resulted in a totally disproportionate use of force against nonviolent protesters (eventually costing the city $2 million in court). Hmmm. It also gave us this gem of a quote from Mike Van Winkle of the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC):

You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.

Part of me wants to think such a statement could only happen in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the run-up to the war in Iraq, and such things. And part of me wants to look at what happened yesterday, observe the increasingly indistinguishable nature of our internal and external “security” apparatuses, and say plus ca change…

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One Comment to ““World Without Walls””

A pal of mine on FB talked about a recent petition (http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dsm5/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=button) to speak out against the upcoming edition of the DSM (the mental health professional’s bible). From the petition: “DSM-IV’s Feature E: ‘Neither deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) nor conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual,’ will instead read ‘[A mental disorder is a behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern] [t]hat is not primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society.'”

The concern here is that it will become easier to classify “sociopolitical deviance” as a kinda-sorta factor in mental illness, which as we know was a favored tactic amongst the Soviets in dealing with their dissidents. It’s definitely slippery-slope stuff, to be sure.

So yes, one can’t help but feel that in the name of public safety, the noose is getting tightened considerably

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